Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Volume Iii, and Why Race Still Matters

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2011

Black Apollo? Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, volume iii, and Why Race Still Matters

Patrice Rankine University of Richmond, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Rankine, Patrice. "Black Apollo? Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, volume iii, and Why Race Still Matters." In African Athena: New Agendas, edited by Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon, 40-55. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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4 one. At the same time, we are no less concerned with origins now than we were in 1976, when George G. M. James published Stolen Legacy, the ostensible shifttowards a model of cultural appropriation 5 2 and influence (over that of a 'stolen legacy') notwithstanding. Aside fromansw ering the question of whether Apollo is in origin an African god, in the third volume Bernal helps us to consider why such an enquiry might still matter, even as we shift from a paradigm of 6 Black Apollo? cultural origins to one of hybridity. Although 'origins' might belong more to the culture wars of the Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The 1980s (in the United States, at least), the fact that the 'nagging Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, question', as it were, of origins will not go away became clear to me again quite recently. During a conference at NorthwesternUniversity volume iii, and Why Race Still Matters in March 2010 concerned with the relationship between Athenian drama and modern African American theatre,7 a participant repeat edly came back to an underlying assumption: did not the Greeks take Patrice D. Rankine theatre from Africa in the first place? The nagging question is, of course, one of authority: the inventor retains first claims; the con versation goes nowhere without a laying-out of the premisses; and who are we Classicists to speak with any clout about African Amer The question of whether the Greek god Apollo has roots in African ican theatre in the first place, when theatre began in Africa? The soil is taken up in Martin Bernal's third and final volume of Black question regarding the origins of theatre, which was never sufficiently Athena: The AfroasiaticRoots of Classical Civilization (2006). Akin to answered (and how could it have been?), attests to a number of the idea of a black Athena, with broader discussions regarding that fundamental principles: concerns about origins, although perhaps enquiry now well known, 1 the African Apolloquestion might seem to 'outdated' within academic circles, have not gone away as cultural many a misguided use of the theoretical tools from archaeology, capital; there is still a need for sensible, rigorous scholarship that historical and literary enquiry, and linguistics, all disciplines within classical studies. Certainly the idea of Greece as the proverbial birth place of civilization, sprung whole like Athena fromZeus's head, is no Greek language, but chose Indo-European instead. Such concessions seem even longer the vogue in classical studies.2 Bernal's own argumentation, of stronger in Black Athena, volume iii. See Bernal (1987, 2006). 4 late, suggests that such a view a ever only a dominant, not solitary, The point can be made simply through an overview of the introduction of 3 "". � Boardman et al. (1986). More recently, Page duBois (2010} has situated Sappho's one. Whatever the case, Class1c1sts now commonly discuss Greece poems and other ancient phenomena within the context of Asian parallels. as simply a part of a broader Mediterranean basin, albeit a crucial 5 George G. M. James's 1976 book Stolen Legacy certainly gave us a succinct way of referring to the idea that Egypt, and not Greece, is the origin of Western civilization. See James (2010). 6 1 or a broad discussion of the black Athena controversy, which included scholarly I am well aware that one of the charges against Bernalis that he did not in factuse � _ publications as well as videotaped academic debates, see Lefkowitz (1996) and Berli solid scholarly methods, but I respectfully disagree. It is time to step away from the nerblau (1999); for the issue of Afrocentrism, which brought the strongest storms in question 'Does he read Greek?' He does, and he is certainly a better Egyptologist than the backlash, see Lefkowitz (1997), Howe (1998), and Moses (1998}. Berlinerblau is the majority of Classicists. For a discussion, see Levine and Peradotto (1989), and Marchand and Grafton (1997). also thorough on Afrocentrism. 7 2 The idea is concomitant with 'the Greek Miracle' of the advent of science and The conference was part of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation John E. Sawyer philosophy. See Bernal (2001). Series 2009-10, entitled 'Theater after Athens: Reception and Revision of Ancient 3 As early as Black Athena, volume i, Bernal offered that scholars like F. A. Wolf Greek Drama'. The instalment 'Greek Drama in African-American Theater' was held had laid out alternative paths of enquiry, such as questions of the Semitic roots of the on 12-13 March 2010. 43 42 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? addresses these social concerns in clear, systematic ways; Martin than it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Germany. Bernal's three-volume Black Athena, along with the tomes of re The diversity of enquirers leads to a plurality of approaches. Edith sponses (thus far primarily to the earlier two volumes), remains the Hall's recent-and striking-comment that the Classics have no in place where such conversations begin. Set in the broader context of trinsic ideology could be the mantra for the free play of ideas that is our contemporary concern for global history and perspectives, the the state of affairs in the early years of the twenty-first century. 12 issue of the origin of theatre, to followour example, still has relevance. Without an 'intrinsic ideology', the Classics become phenomena At the same time, such a conversation (about global history and to which anyone, from any culture, at any time, can lay claim. And, perspectives) might lead us away from any privileging of, or focus yet, the dehistoricizing of events and texts that Hall's observation on, Africa, and this is a concern for segments of the global society. suggests is one that would trouble any student of the past. What is Just as Europe (or Asia) is a priority to some, Africa and the African left of Greece, Rome, or even Africa, in this new world of cultural diaspora continue to interest others. appropriation? Black Athena remains the place where the type of enquiry with The interlocutor at the Northwestern conference, with his nagging which I am concerned might begin. Despite the continued relevance question-did not Africans invent theatre?-calls us back from our of his work, Martin Bernal's third volume has not received anything new, presentist obsessions, to the question of origins, or at least to the 8 close to the critical attention of his previous offerings. The state of question of history. The question also, in a way, gives the lie to 9 affairs is quite different from what it was in the 1980s and 1990s. In classicism. If the Classics have no intrinsic ideology, why do we still America, the culture wars seem to have subsided, although the emer hold on to spectres of European gods, that the Greeks themselves are gence of a black president has simultaneously led to calls to lay aside the guilty party in firstdrawing the line between us and them, Europe 13 race as an existential factor in people's lives, while at the same time and Asia, Greeks and barbarians? Should we not be as much (paradoxically) suggesting blackness as a spectre that continues to students of ancient Africa and Asia as we are of Greece and Rome? haunt.10 In academic circles, as I have suggested, scholarship has And how are the ideologies and perspectives that we are bringing to widened significantly. Within classical studies, fields of enquiry such bear on the past influencing our enquiries? Even if we leave aside the as Classica Africana, with its focus primarily on black Classicists in imperial model (the Aryan Model) by which, according to Bernal, the United States and their influence, and Reception Studies in the some European scholars might have seen the past in the eighteenth United Kingdom, which takes up Classics in the postcolonial mind, and nineteenth centuries, we are certainly still trapped in certain including analyses of the works of people of African and Asian modern approaches. It would seem natural, for example, that a descent, the picture is quite different from what it was in 1987.11 hybridized mind would go back to seek out hybrid origins. Here we The spectrum of those who lay claim to the Classics is much wider are again, reshaping our past to suit our present consciousness. And it certainly gets us nowhere to tell our Northwestern interlocutor that he is asking the wrong question. It would be best to understand why 8 As far as I can tell, the third volume has yet to be reviewed by any of the major he is asking the question, and then we can decide if it is worth our classical journals in the United States, nor has it been reviewed in such venues as the New York Review of Books. time suggesting some approaches. Volume iii of Black Athena prof 9 The popular American discussion might be charted from Bloom (1987), to fers that it is still worth asking questions about origins. Knox {1994), Lefkowitz (1992), and Ray (1997). Much of the third volume of Black Athena is for linguists to take 10 Recent political movements in the United States such as the Tea Party move on, and in it Bernal continues to present his argument from the ment continue to have strong racial overtones, as New York Times columnist Charles Blow, among others, continues to chart. On race and existentialism, one approach to the continued prevalence of race, see Gordon (2000). On race as a continuing factor in the postmodern world, see Gilroy {2006). 12 The lecture 'Ancient Slavery & Modem Abolition', delivered on 18 February 11 For an overview of Classica Africana, see Rankine (2006). Representative work 2010, was the Kreeger-Wolf Lecture at N orthwestem University, where Professor Hall from the innovators in the field of Reception Studies includes Hardwick (2000), Joshel was serving as Kreeger-Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor. et al. (2001), Goffand Simpson (2007), and Hall (2008). 13 For the argument, see Hall {1991). 43 42 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? addresses these social concerns in clear, systematic ways; Martin than it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Germany. Bernal's three-volume Black Athena, along with the tomes of re The diversity of enquirers leads to a plurality of approaches. Edith sponses (thus far primarily to the earlier two volumes), remains the Hall's recent-and striking-comment that the Classics have no in place where such conversations begin. Set in the broader context of trinsic ideology could be the mantra for the free play of ideas that is our contemporary concern for global history and perspectives, the the state of affairs in the early years of the twenty-first century. 12 issue of the origin of theatre, to followour example, still has relevance. Without an 'intrinsic ideology', the Classics become phenomena At the same time, such a conversation (about global history and to which anyone, from any culture, at any time, can lay claim. And, perspectives) might lead us away from any privileging of, or focus yet, the dehistoricizing of events and texts that Hall's observation on, Africa, and this is a concern for segments of the global society. suggests is one that would trouble any student of the past. What is Just as Europe (or Asia) is a priority to some, Africa and the African left of Greece, Rome, or even Africa, in this new world of cultural diaspora continue to interest others. appropriation? Black Athena remains the place where the type of enquiry with The interlocutor at the Northwestern conference, with his nagging which I am concerned might begin. Despite the continued relevance question-did not Africans invent theatre?-calls us back from our of his work, Martin Bernal's third volume has not received anything new, presentist obsessions, to the question of origins, or at least to the 8 close to the critical attention of his previous offerings. The state of question of history. The question also, in a way, gives the lie to 9 affairs is quite different from what it was in the 1980s and 1990s. In classicism. If the Classics have no intrinsic ideology, why do we still America, the culture wars seem to have subsided, although the emer hold on to spectres of European gods, that the Greeks themselves are gence of a black president has simultaneously led to calls to lay aside the guilty party in firstdrawing the line between us and them, Europe 13 race as an existential factor in people's lives, while at the same time and Asia, Greeks and barbarians? Should we not be as much (paradoxically) suggesting blackness as a spectre that continues to students of ancient Africa and Asia as we are of Greece and Rome? haunt.10 In academic circles, as I have suggested, scholarship has And how are the ideologies and perspectives that we are bringing to widened significantly. Within classical studies, fields of enquiry such bear on the past influencing our enquiries? Even if we leave aside the as Classica Africana, with its focus primarily on black Classicists in imperial model (the Aryan Model) by which, according to Bernal, the United States and their influence, and Reception Studies in the some European scholars might have seen the past in the eighteenth United Kingdom, which takes up Classics in the postcolonial mind, and nineteenth centuries, we are certainly still trapped in certain including analyses of the works of people of African and Asian modern approaches. It would seem natural, for example, that a descent, the picture is quite different from what it was in 1987.11 hybridized mind would go back to seek out hybrid origins. Here we The spectrum of those who lay claim to the Classics is much wider are again, reshaping our past to suit our present consciousness. And it certainly gets us nowhere to tell our Northwestern interlocutor that he is asking the wrong question. It would be best to understand why 8 As far as I can tell, the third volume has yet to be reviewed by any of the major he is asking the question, and then we can decide if it is worth our classical journals in the United States, nor has it been reviewed in such venues as the New York Review of Books. time suggesting some approaches. Volume iii of Black Athena prof 9 The popular American discussion might be charted from Bloom (1987), to fers that it is still worth asking questions about origins. Knox {1994), Lefkowitz (1992), and Ray (1997). Much of the third volume of Black Athena is for linguists to take 10 Recent political movements in the United States such as the Tea Party move on, and in it Bernal continues to present his argument from the ment continue to have strong racial overtones, as New York Times columnist Charles Blow, among others, continues to chart. On race and existentialism, one approach to the continued prevalence of race, see Gordon (2000). On race as a continuing factor in the postmodern world, see Gilroy {2006). 12 The lecture 'Ancient Slavery & Modem Abolition', delivered on 18 February 11 For an overview of Classica Africana, see Rankine (2006). Representative work 2010, was the Kreeger-Wolf Lecture at N orthwestem University, where Professor Hall from the innovators in the field of Reception Studies includes Hardwick (2000), Joshel was serving as Kreeger-Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor. et al. (2001), Goffand Simpson (2007), and Hall (2008). 13 For the argument, see Hall {1991). 44 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 45 standpoint of 'competitive plausibility' (on which see Berlinerblau More than learning the methods of an historian, the question of an 1999). After spending over 200 pages just on Indo-European, Indo AfricanApollo returns us to the cultural divide that still exists, at least Hittite, and the structure of classical Greek, Bernal turns to applying in North America, and is played out in academic debates. As Jacques these to conceptual, theoretical, and cultural links between ancient Berlinerblau (1999) offeredwith respect to Bernal's previous volumes, Greece and its Mediterranean neighbours. Bernal (2006: 269-71) one of Black Athena's legacies was an integration of knowledge links concepts such as moira, the Greek idea of 'fate', to Semitic between specialists in classical studies and, for lack of a better term, counterparts. He finds Egyptian and Semitic words and ideas in Afrocentric scholars. That is, Bernal stood in the divide between the Greek conceptions of nature and agriculture, medicine, and hunting. Classics and Afrocentrism. I take Afrocentrism not as the fringe Here again, Bernal' s process is noteworthy because it steers us away ideology that Mary Lefkowitz attacked during the high points-or from ahistoricism; he draws us to the question of historical contact perhaps they were the low points-of the Black Athena debate. and influence, and this causes us to examine the phenomena we have Rather, I followWilson Jeremiah Moses's assessment (1998) of Afro appropriated. The end of this enquiry notwithstanding (can we ever centrism as a long-standing component of black thought in North truly return to the beginning, the origin?), the importance of the America, linked to broader Western ideas, such as the interplay process becomes increasingly clear. between anti-modernism and the idea of progress. As Moses offers, From the standpoint of social history and cultural phenomena, scholars as central to American life as W. E. B. DuBois deployed the African Apollo, like black Athena, is, to my mind, the easiest entry term 'Afrocentric' with all its attendant associations. Moses sees into Black Athena, volume iii. Apollo is, for many European thinkers Afrocentrism as concomitant with an African American idea of (and I am thinking of Nietzsche), the most Greek of the Olympian decline (that blacks in America lost a great tradition), which an gods (Bernal 2006: 455), leaving aside Athena and her patronage of ecumenical Ethiopianism (where Ethiopia 'stretches forth her Athens, the most Greek of cities. Apollo, god of reason, enlightened hands', as Marcus Garvey put it, and receives the lost Diaspora) loxias, antithesis to Nietzsche's Dionysus. Wresting Apollo from the counters. 14 Put succinctly, Afrocentrism, more than a fringeideology, grips of European scholars, a grip held since Winckelmann's famous is a broad-based effort to counter what is effectively the writing of paean to the Apollo Belvedere, Bernal makes the idea of a non Africa out of history. This effort is at times conscious, and at times European Apollo. plausible. By doing so, Bernal accomplishes a feat inadvertent. As I have been intimating, and as will become clearer that eluded a number of non-specialists, Afrocentrists, and others in the example of African Apollo, the model within the United who held similar hypotheses (as I show more clearly momentarily). States has been that of a conscious (perhaps self-conscious and self My aim here is not to come to a definite conclusion about Apollo's defeating) Afrocentrism.The example of Brazil, however, as the other origins. I hope that I have made it clear how messy an ordeal such a locale to which the majority of African bodies were transported conclusion would be. I am more interested here in the cultural during the slave trade, is one of a more organic Africa-centred life. context in which the question is raised, and for this reason I do Whereas African retentions (from the hundreds of years of slave think that the question is worthy of our time. The enquiry into the traffic to the New World) have to be uncovered and shown within origin of Apollo, within the context of free-flowing cultural appro the United States, they are ubiquitous in Brazil.15 There is perhaps priations (the Classics without an intrinsic ideology), might lead to nothing exceptional about Africa,and yet the priority of Africato tens the question: 'So what?' The specific idea of an African Apollo might of millions of people in North America and Brazil, as a focal point of bring us to an understanding of how such an investigation might be conducted, but certainly historical enquiry necessitates a laying-out of 14 The contours of Ethiopianism are perhaps most clearly defined in the Rastafari methods. Understanding Greece's and Africa's positions in the an movement. See Chevannes (1995) and Shilliam, Chapter 6, this volume. 15 cient Mediterranean is not the only context for learning the methods Any number of examples fromreligious and social practices might suffice, but Floyd Merrell's study (2005) of capoeira and candomble takes a comprehensive look of a historian. Why does this particular question, these particular at the phenomena of history, African retentions, and resistance among people of geographical areas and time periods, matter? African descent in Brazil. 44 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 45 standpoint of 'competitive plausibility' (on which see Berlinerblau More than learning the methods of an historian, the question of an 1999). After spending over 200 pages just on Indo-European, Indo AfricanApollo returns us to the cultural divide that still exists, at least Hittite, and the structure of classical Greek, Bernal turns to applying in North America, and is played out in academic debates. As Jacques these to conceptual, theoretical, and cultural links between ancient Berlinerblau (1999) offeredwith respect to Bernal's previous volumes, Greece and its Mediterranean neighbours. Bernal (2006: 269-71) one of Black Athena's legacies was an integration of knowledge links concepts such as moira, the Greek idea of 'fate', to Semitic between specialists in classical studies and, for lack of a better term, counterparts. He finds Egyptian and Semitic words and ideas in Afrocentric scholars. That is, Bernal stood in the divide between the Greek conceptions of nature and agriculture, medicine, and hunting. Classics and Afrocentrism. I take Afrocentrism not as the fringe Here again, Bernal' s process is noteworthy because it steers us away ideology that Mary Lefkowitz attacked during the high points-or from ahistoricism; he draws us to the question of historical contact perhaps they were the low points-of the Black Athena debate. and influence, and this causes us to examine the phenomena we have Rather, I followWilson Jeremiah Moses's assessment (1998) of Afro appropriated. The end of this enquiry notwithstanding (can we ever centrism as a long-standing component of black thought in North truly return to the beginning, the origin?), the importance of the America, linked to broader Western ideas, such as the interplay process becomes increasingly clear. between anti-modernism and the idea of progress. As Moses offers, From the standpoint of social history and cultural phenomena, scholars as central to American life as W. E. B. DuBois deployed the African Apollo, like black Athena, is, to my mind, the easiest entry term 'Afrocentric' with all its attendant associations. Moses sees into Black Athena, volume iii. Apollo is, for many European thinkers Afrocentrism as concomitant with an African American idea of (and I am thinking of Nietzsche), the most Greek of the Olympian decline (that blacks in America lost a great tradition), which an gods (Bernal 2006: 455), leaving aside Athena and her patronage of ecumenical Ethiopianism (where Ethiopia 'stretches forth her Athens, the most Greek of cities. Apollo, god of reason, enlightened hands', as Marcus Garvey put it, and receives the lost Diaspora) loxias, antithesis to Nietzsche's Dionysus. Wresting Apollo from the counters. 14 Put succinctly, Afrocentrism, more than a fringeideology, grips of European scholars, a grip held since Winckelmann's famous is a broad-based effort to counter what is effectively the writing of paean to the Apollo Belvedere, Bernal makes the idea of a non Africa out of history. This effort is at times conscious, and at times European Apollo. plausible. By doing so, Bernal accomplishes a feat inadvertent. As I have been intimating, and as will become clearer that eluded a number of non-specialists, Afrocentrists, and others in the example of African Apollo, the model within the United who held similar hypotheses (as I show more clearly momentarily). States has been that of a conscious (perhaps self-conscious and self My aim here is not to come to a definite conclusion about Apollo's defeating) Afrocentrism.The example of Brazil, however, as the other origins. I hope that I have made it clear how messy an ordeal such a locale to which the majority of African bodies were transported conclusion would be. I am more interested here in the cultural during the slave trade, is one of a more organic Africa-centred life. context in which the question is raised, and for this reason I do Whereas African retentions (from the hundreds of years of slave think that the question is worthy of our time. The enquiry into the traffic to the New World) have to be uncovered and shown within origin of Apollo, within the context of free-flowing cultural appro the United States, they are ubiquitous in Brazil.15 There is perhaps priations (the Classics without an intrinsic ideology), might lead to nothing exceptional about Africa,and yet the priority of Africato tens the question: 'So what?' The specific idea of an African Apollo might of millions of people in North America and Brazil, as a focal point of bring us to an understanding of how such an investigation might be conducted, but certainly historical enquiry necessitates a laying-out of 14 The contours of Ethiopianism are perhaps most clearly defined in the Rastafari methods. Understanding Greece's and Africa's positions in the an movement. See Chevannes (1995) and Shilliam, Chapter 6, this volume. 15 cient Mediterranean is not the only context for learning the methods Any number of examples fromreligious and social practices might suffice, but Floyd Merrell's study (2005) of capoeira and candomble takes a comprehensive look of a historian. Why does this particular question, these particular at the phenomena of history, African retentions, and resistance among people of geographical areas and time periods, matter? African descent in Brazil. 46 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 47 ideology and social practice, as well as a field of historical and Altertumswissenschaft (Bernal 1987). Bernal cites Nietzsche, Hegel, scholarly enquiry, is undeniable. and Marx among the writers whose intense 'Hellenomania' led to the Within a sociopolitical context that acknowledges the political play emergence of an Aryan Model (Bernal 1987). Part and parcel of this of academic ideas, an AfricanApollo-like a black Athena-stands in model was the elevation of Apollo as a European god of reason (in as a symbol for something much greater than the scholarly enquiry opposition to his foreign, irrational counterpart, Dionysus), the itself. In their search for African origins, black American writers in downplaying of foreign (Asian, Syrian, or Egyptian) origin, and the the Afrocentric vein were doing no more than their European and idea of Greek material realities being more advanced than those of white American counterparts, who legitimated their own position Egypt. Bernal summarizes the case against the moderns in Black through Greek origins. To the extent that Wilson posits Afrocentrism Athena, volume i: in the end as a Western phenomenon, he concurs with Paul Gilroy And he [Marx] was living in an age when everybody felt in their bones that (1993) with respect to the blackness of modernity. That is, the Greece was categorically apart from, and above, Egypt. Thus the destruction modern world is one of cultural appropriation; modernity is achieved of the Ancient Model gave his generation a freedomon this question that was through particular approaches to and elisions of the past. not available to Hegel. Marx was able to deny Egyptian influence on Greece In contrast to the previous volumes of Black Athena, which found outright. (Bernal 1987: 296) themselves at the centre of the racial divide, Black Athena, volume iii, arrives in the context of a more strident, postcolonial environment. In The rejection of Herodotus as a trustworthy source would follow from this logic, and indeed indictment of Bernal's trust of Herodotus the context of the early twenty-first century, an African Apollo serves 16 in a similar way to Frank Snowden's 'blacks' in antiquity, which was an ongoing feature of the Black Athena debate of the 1990s. sought, not for an Afrocentric home in Africa, but for an acceptable, Bernal's resuscitation of the Ancient Model, therefore, begins with non-confrontational integration in Greece. African Apollo is a post- the critique of the biases of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial, hybrid entity. scholars, and the case of an African Apollo is no exception. If Bernal It is worth spending some time on Bernal's arguments for an raises charges against European scholars in Black Athena, volume i, African Apollo. Bernal's approach to an African Apollo (he is less he lays out the counter-evidence in volumes ii and iii. Bernal hints at insistent on the 'blackness' of Egypt in volume iii than he was in the Apollo/Horus connection throughout Black Athena, volume ii, volume i) will be familiar to anyone versed in the debates around and he sets up the linguistic analysis that would come in volume iii: Black Athena, volumes i and ii. Bernal begins with Herodotus. Quot 'I believe that many of the Greek divine names, such as Apollo, Athena ing Egyptians on the subject of a floating island, Herodotus tells us and so on, were in fact Egyptian and that when Herodotus said that Apollo is Egyptian Horus (2.156). Apollo and Artemis are the "names" he usually meant just that, names' (Bernal 1991: 109-10). offspring of Dionysus and Isis. As we know from Black Athena, By volume iii, Bernal returns to the analysis of European scholars that volume i, Herodotus is a lynchpin to Bernal's Ancient Model, a underscored the first volume: prism through which Bernal claims that Greeks saw their own past. From at least the fifth century BCE until the early nineteenth CE Apollo was In Black Athena, volume i, Bernal claims that Herodotus knew the universally assumed to be the young god of the sun. Karl Ottfried Millier Egyptians to be black, and, as in the case of Apollo, Herodotus gives challengedthis image with his view that Apollo was the dynamic 'golden-haired' us many clues to the connection between Africa and Greece. Egypt, tribal god of the northern Dorians. He claimed that the earliest Greek texts did which still held a high place in the Renaissance imagination, was not refer to the god's solar aspects. (Bernal 2006: 454) transformed and held a lower status in eighteenth-century ideas of progress, and was still further diminished during nineteenth-century 16 Black Athena, Romanticism. This is Bernal' s Aryan Model. For Bernal, none of these Scholarship since the publication of volume i, attests to the countless areas upon which Bernal's thesis touches. Beginning with the critique of moves, in and of themselves, would have led to the rewriting of the Bernal's reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European thinkers, the range Ancient Model. They culminate, however, in German classicism, of responses has been as wide as the maestro's charges. See Lefkowitz (1996). 46 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 47 ideology and social practice, as well as a field of historical and Altertumswissenschaft (Bernal 1987). Bernal cites Nietzsche, Hegel, scholarly enquiry, is undeniable. and Marx among the writers whose intense 'Hellenomania' led to the Within a sociopolitical context that acknowledges the political play emergence of an Aryan Model (Bernal 1987). Part and parcel of this of academic ideas, an AfricanApollo-like a black Athena-stands in model was the elevation of Apollo as a European god of reason (in as a symbol for something much greater than the scholarly enquiry opposition to his foreign, irrational counterpart, Dionysus), the itself. In their search for African origins, black American writers in downplaying of foreign (Asian, Syrian, or Egyptian) origin, and the the Afrocentric vein were doing no more than their European and idea of Greek material realities being more advanced than those of white American counterparts, who legitimated their own position Egypt. Bernal summarizes the case against the moderns in Black through Greek origins. To the extent that Wilson posits Afrocentrism Athena, volume i: in the end as a Western phenomenon, he concurs with Paul Gilroy And he [Marx] was living in an age when everybody felt in their bones that (1993) with respect to the blackness of modernity. That is, the Greece was categorically apart from, and above, Egypt. Thus the destruction modern world is one of cultural appropriation; modernity is achieved of the Ancient Model gave his generation a freedomon this question that was through particular approaches to and elisions of the past. not available to Hegel. Marx was able to deny Egyptian influence on Greece In contrast to the previous volumes of Black Athena, which found outright. (Bernal 1987: 296) themselves at the centre of the racial divide, Black Athena, volume iii, arrives in the context of a more strident, postcolonial environment. In The rejection of Herodotus as a trustworthy source would follow from this logic, and indeed indictment of Bernal's trust of Herodotus the context of the early twenty-first century, an African Apollo serves 16 in a similar way to Frank Snowden's 'blacks' in antiquity, which was an ongoing feature of the Black Athena debate of the 1990s. sought, not for an Afrocentric home in Africa, but for an acceptable, Bernal's resuscitation of the Ancient Model, therefore, begins with non-confrontational integration in Greece. African Apollo is a post- the critique of the biases of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial, hybrid entity. scholars, and the case of an African Apollo is no exception. If Bernal It is worth spending some time on Bernal's arguments for an raises charges against European scholars in Black Athena, volume i, African Apollo. Bernal's approach to an African Apollo (he is less he lays out the counter-evidence in volumes ii and iii. Bernal hints at insistent on the 'blackness' of Egypt in volume iii than he was in the Apollo/Horus connection throughout Black Athena, volume ii, volume i) will be familiar to anyone versed in the debates around and he sets up the linguistic analysis that would come in volume iii: Black Athena, volumes i and ii. Bernal begins with Herodotus. Quot 'I believe that many of the Greek divine names, such as Apollo, Athena ing Egyptians on the subject of a floating island, Herodotus tells us and so on, were in fact Egyptian and that when Herodotus said that Apollo is Egyptian Horus (2.156). Apollo and Artemis are the "names" he usually meant just that, names' (Bernal 1991: 109-10). offspring of Dionysus and Isis. As we know from Black Athena, By volume iii, Bernal returns to the analysis of European scholars that volume i, Herodotus is a lynchpin to Bernal's Ancient Model, a underscored the first volume: prism through which Bernal claims that Greeks saw their own past. From at least the fifth century BCE until the early nineteenth CE Apollo was In Black Athena, volume i, Bernal claims that Herodotus knew the universally assumed to be the young god of the sun. Karl Ottfried Millier Egyptians to be black, and, as in the case of Apollo, Herodotus gives challengedthis image with his view that Apollo was the dynamic 'golden-haired' us many clues to the connection between Africa and Greece. Egypt, tribal god of the northern Dorians. He claimed that the earliest Greek texts did which still held a high place in the Renaissance imagination, was not refer to the god's solar aspects. (Bernal 2006: 454) transformed and held a lower status in eighteenth-century ideas of progress, and was still further diminished during nineteenth-century 16 Black Athena, Romanticism. This is Bernal' s Aryan Model. For Bernal, none of these Scholarship since the publication of volume i, attests to the countless areas upon which Bernal's thesis touches. Beginning with the critique of moves, in and of themselves, would have led to the rewriting of the Bernal's reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European thinkers, the range Ancient Model. They culminate, however, in German classicism, of responses has been as wide as the maestro's charges. See Lefkowitz (1996). 48 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 49

The alleged denigration of Egypt in nineteenth-century European Dorian for 'sacred assembly' (d.1r.f,\,\ai, apellai): 'Unimpressed, the lex scholarship is again evident in Bernal's analysis of Muller. The cen icographers Frisk and Chantraine declare that the etymology of Apollo is trality of the sun to Egyptian practices goes without saying. Bernal is "unknown"' (Bernal 2006: 455). Bernal expands on an etymology he had suspicious of the severing of Apollo from his solar connections. The already suggested in Black Athena, volume ii, which is a linguistic tie that nineteenth-century trend was to make Apollo Dorian, a 'hyperbor gives legs, as it were, to Herodotus' assertion that Apollo is called Horus in ean' godwho resides 'beyond the north wind' (Bernal 2006: 455). Egypt Although the name Apollo is absent from the Linear B, Bernal The idea of Apollo as an exclusively European god would certainly turnsto Paieon, who is a healer in Homer and has strong ties to Egypt. (In hold through the middle of the twentieth century, Bernal (2006: 455) Homer's Iliad, e.g. 4.232, he was said to havebrought medicine to Egypt.) claims, despite his concession that scholars were more open to 'east Paieon as an epithet forApollo is attested in inscriptions, and the 'paean' ern connections' by the late twentieth century. Here we might discern is of course the song of victory, often addressed to Apollo (attested in a softening of what Berlinerblau called Bernal's 'big picturism', his Liddell and Scott). For Bernal(2006: 456), Paieon is 'a byword of Horus' tendency to think in terms of'models', thereby establishing structures through Egyptian }fr.Since Bernal' s arguments are primarily linguistic, it into which evidence might be forcedto fit. Concessions were already would take someone with interdisciplinary training in Egyptology and evident in Bernal's Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Re Greek to challenge them. As if aware of this, Bernal continues to ground sponds to his Critics (2001), in which Bernal suggests that scholars his argument in broader, ideological issues. He claimed, for example, that were already turning towards a more open disposition:. What Bernal one way that European scholars dislodged Apollo from his Egyptian was getting at all along, however, was the extent to which social and connection was to deny his early (pre-fifth century) connection to the political environment to some extent determines how 'scientists' see worship of the sun. Apollo's Homeric epithet lykegenes, which has a the world and conduct their research. Bernal made this point again 'wonderful ambiguity', could be taken as binding the god to Lyda, during his keynote at the 'African Athena' conference in 2008, at the rendering him a wolf (from lukos), or as meaning 'light born' or 'light University of Warwick, when he discussed the political environment begetting' (Bernal 2006). It should be clear by now that Bernal prefers of his own Cornell University in the decade or so leading up to Black lykegenes, 'born of light', because this etymology ties Apollo to sun wor Athena, volume i (see Bernal, 'Afterword',this volume). In the case of ship. Walter Burkert's earlier analysis and citations give Bernal room to Apollo, Berkeley University scholar Joseph Fontenrose to some extent roam: 'modern scholars dispute whether the name Apollo Lykeios has renders Bernal's reading of a hyperborean Apollo as too literalist. to do with Lyda, "light" or the "wolf" -most Greeks, in any case, took it Published in 1959, Fontenrose's Python gives a different take on to mean "wolf" (Burkert 1983: 121). Apollo's hyperborean home: the remoteness of the place 'beyond Given the linguistic link that Bernal creates between Hr and the north wind' makes it mysterious, just as Ethiopia is the paradise Paieon, which he buttresses with the epithet lykegenes, he is able to where Zeus goes to party in Homer's Iliad 1 and elsewhere. Snow draw his conclusions in the most emphatic possible terms: 'In any den's cautionary remarks against imposing modern biases onto clas event, the *luk stem clearly indicates that from Homeric or pre sical Greek minds fithere (in Lefkowitz 1996); our North and South, Homeric times, Apollo was associated with the calendar and heavenly Europe, Asia, and Africa, do not map neatly onto the classical world. lights, the sun and the moon' (2006: 458). Bernal makes his case piece For the ancients, 'beyond the north wind' is as exotic-non-Greek by piece, block by block, word by word. The Homeric epithet for as Ethiopia (Hartog 2009). We already have trouble fitting all the Apollo hekebolos, the 'far-shooter', is 'interesting' forBernal because evidence into Bernal's Ancient Model, even if some of his charges of Horus, I:jrw, is from br, which means 'distant' (2006: 460). Bernal the social and political prisms through which later scholars saw the likens the Homeric image of Apollo, who swoops down like a falcon Greek world are verifiable. (Iliad 15.236-8), to the iconography of Horus: 'In Egyptian theology The crux of Bernal's argument for an African origin of Apollo Horus was the falconhigh in the skyswooping down on his victims' perhaps the Africa we imagine, not the one in the Greek imagination (2006: 460). With the preponderance of evidence now stacked in is the linguistic evidence. He first rejects the etymology of Apollo in the favour of his argument, Bernal is able to offerApollo's Africanorigin 50 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 51 through competitive plausibility. That is, viewed fromthe perspective the Greek origins of Western civilization. By African, North Amer ican Negro writers meant 'black'. With its publication in 2006, Black of the facts, Bernal proposes African Apollo as a stronger hypothesis than the others. Athena, volume iii, returns to the milieu, and race might well remain If we leave aside forthe moment the question of the blackness, as it a factor in the reception of the book. It is worth noting that, as it were, or the Africanness, of Egypt, one that gets us into Snowden's pertains to an African Apollo, Bernal again enters a discussion he objections to Black Athena, volume i, Bernal, at the very least, shows might not have directly anticipated. The Afrocentricstrain of scholar us how we might begin to approach such an enquiry. Early objections ship has already appropriated Apollo. In 1982, for example, The to his methodology notwithstanding, Bernal presents forus the set of Journal of Negro History published an article, written by Eloise skills that would be required to conduct the type of interdisciplinary McKinney Johnson, titled 'Delphos of Delphi'. Johnson had already scholarship that would approach issues of Greece's early contact with gone a step furtherthan Bernal does by tracing Egypt's own origins to North Africa and the Near East. These skills include textual analysis Ethiopia. The position that, to cite Berlinerblau (1999: 153), 'Egyp (an understanding of authors, their tendencies, and their context), tians are descendants of an indigenous Africancohort' is an old one along with a cultural, literary, and methodological analysis of authors, in Afrocentric thought, one that extends back at least into the nine such as Herodotus; linguistic analysis, such as is evident in Bernal's teenth century, as other chapters in this volume interrogate. Johnson treatment of the *luk root, J:Ir, and hekebolos; and an understanding (1982: 279) intertwines the discussion of Apollo into her view of of religious practices, migration trends, and scholarship on these Ethiopia: 'Mythology books in the English language tell us that Delphi subjects, as well as the polemics stemming fromthe various positions means dolphin and that the area's first settlers arrived from Crete a scholar might take. astride a dolphin's back. These books, however, ignore Delphos and But why make the effort?We come again to the nagging question: So his Ethiopian origins.' what? What if Apollo is a god whose worship in Greece had some If we leave aside forthe moment the supposed connection between precursor in Africa?Even if the idea of origins has fallen out of vogue in Ethiopia and Egypt, Bernal's etymologies would suggest that John academic circles, it is probably unavoidable-or at least still irresistible. son's claims of a non-European origin of Apollo are worthy of further If questions of origin are to be asked, it is certainly worth considering study: why they are being asked, how we mightgo about answering them, and A cluster of words central to the cult of Apollo derives from Afroasiatic, where our answers might lead. And, independent of origins, sites of probably Semitic but possibly also Egyptian. It is the series listed by cultural appropriation remain: Europe, Africa, and Asia. As it pertains Chantraine under one heading: oD,cf,at [delphax] (5) 'sow'; oE>..cf,fr, oE>..cf,i:voc; to a 'black' Athena, or an AfricanApollo, I have already touched upon [delphis, delphinos] (5) 'dolphin'; LJdcf,o{ [Delphoi] (H) 'Delphi,' city of the context of North American intellectual life within which Bernal's Apollo and the oracle; and OEA..cf,6c;[adelphos] (H) 'brother'. (Bernal 2006: 472) of the Afrocentric idea at one end of the American intellectual divide, Bernal gives further clues to an obscurity that Johnson (1982: 279) and Moses offered that even the search fororigins among black Amer claims has been 'a carefully shrouded secret'. Bernal (2006: 473) icans is tantamount to that of broader Western classicism. In the argues that the word group for Delphi have Semitic, and likely twentieth century in America, Moses sees the quest forAfrican origins Egyptian, origins, as 'no Indo-European etymology has been pro even in W. E. B. DuBois, himself a classicist by training, who would be posed fordelphus itself'. well aware of the counterpoint he was creating to European origins. How did Johnson come to a similar idea as Bernal's? Johnson Once we understand the historical context of the question of origin, sites opens her article with a quotation from Peter Tompkins's Secrets of of appropriation remain. the Great Pyramid, which is also her main source . (Bernal mentions Bernal's broader relationship to Afrocentrism is well documented. Tompkins twice in his first volume; Johnson is not cited at all.) Black Athena From the publication of the first volume in 1987, was Tompkins (as quoted at the opening of Johnson's article) proffered swept up in well-established discussions of the African as opposed to 50 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 51 through competitive plausibility. That is, viewed fromthe perspective the Greek origins of Western civilization. By African, North Amer ican Negro writers meant 'black'. With its publication in 2006, Black of the facts, Bernal proposes African Apollo as a stronger hypothesis than the others. Athena, volume iii, returns to the milieu, and race might well remain If we leave aside forthe moment the question of the blackness, as it a factor in the reception of the book. It is worth noting that, as it were, or the Africanness, of Egypt, one that gets us into Snowden's pertains to an African Apollo, Bernal again enters a discussion he objections to Black Athena, volume i, Bernal, at the very least, shows might not have directly anticipated. The Afrocentricstrain of scholar us how we might begin to approach such an enquiry. Early objections ship has already appropriated Apollo. In 1982, for example, The to his methodology notwithstanding, Bernal presents forus the set of Journal of Negro History published an article, written by Eloise skills that would be required to conduct the type of interdisciplinary McKinney Johnson, titled 'Delphos of Delphi'. Johnson had already scholarship that would approach issues of Greece's early contact with gone a step furtherthan Bernal does by tracing Egypt's own origins to North Africa and the Near East. These skills include textual analysis Ethiopia. The position that, to cite Berlinerblau (1999: 153), 'Egyp (an understanding of authors, their tendencies, and their context), tians are descendants of an indigenous Africancohort' is an old one along with a cultural, literary, and methodological analysis of authors, in Afrocentric thought, one that extends back at least into the nine such as Herodotus; linguistic analysis, such as is evident in Bernal's teenth century, as other chapters in this volume interrogate. Johnson treatment of the *luk root, J:Ir, and hekebolos; and an understanding (1982: 279) intertwines the discussion of Apollo into her view of of religious practices, migration trends, and scholarship on these Ethiopia: 'Mythology books in the English language tell us that Delphi subjects, as well as the polemics stemming fromthe various positions means dolphin and that the area's first settlers arrived from Crete a scholar might take. astride a dolphin's back. These books, however, ignore Delphos and But why make the effort?We come again to the nagging question: So his Ethiopian origins.' what? What if Apollo is a god whose worship in Greece had some If we leave aside forthe moment the supposed connection between precursor in Africa?Even if the idea of origins has fallen out of vogue in Ethiopia and Egypt, Bernal's etymologies would suggest that John academic circles, it is probably unavoidable-or at least still irresistible. son's claims of a non-European origin of Apollo are worthy of further If questions of origin are to be asked, it is certainly worth considering study: why they are being asked, how we mightgo about answering them, and A cluster of words central to the cult of Apollo derives from Afroasiatic, where our answers might lead. And, independent of origins, sites of probably Semitic but possibly also Egyptian. It is the series listed by cultural appropriation remain: Europe, Africa, and Asia. As it pertains Chantraine under one heading: oD,cf,at [delphax] (5) 'sow'; oE>..cf,fr, oE>..cf,i:voc; to a 'black' Athena, or an AfricanApollo, I have already touched upon [delphis, delphinos] (5) 'dolphin'; LJdcf,o{ [Delphoi] (H) 'Delphi,' city of the context of North American intellectual life within which Bernal's Apollo and the oracle; and OEA..cf,6c;[adelphos] (H) 'brother'. (Bernal 2006: 472) of the Afrocentric idea at one end of the American intellectual divide, Bernal gives further clues to an obscurity that Johnson (1982: 279) and Moses offered that even the search fororigins among black Amer claims has been 'a carefully shrouded secret'. Bernal (2006: 473) icans is tantamount to that of broader Western classicism. In the argues that the word group for Delphi have Semitic, and likely twentieth century in America, Moses sees the quest forAfrican origins Egyptian, origins, as 'no Indo-European etymology has been pro even in W. E. B. DuBois, himself a classicist by training, who would be posed fordelphus itself'. well aware of the counterpoint he was creating to European origins. How did Johnson come to a similar idea as Bernal's? Johnson Once we understand the historical context of the question of origin, sites opens her article with a quotation from Peter Tompkins's Secrets of of appropriation remain. the Great Pyramid, which is also her main source . (Bernal mentions Bernal's broader relationship to Afrocentrism is well documented. Tompkins twice in his first volume; Johnson is not cited at all.) Black Athena From the publication of the first volume in 1987, was Tompkins (as quoted at the opening of Johnson's article) proffered swept up in well-established discussions of the African as opposed to 52 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 53 that Egyptian Pharaohs established the oracle at Delphi during the womb that causes hysteria and therefore needs to be weighted down. Ethiopian dynasty. Together, the clues and independent claims-even we might speculate further about hysteria, the madness of the Pythia, from those closer to the 'lunatic fringe' than orthodox scholars-do and oracular practices at Delphi, with its possible connections to read like a mystery novel (Bernal 1987: 276). Surprisingly, it is Egyptian or Ethiopian-African-social and religious practices. Snowden who offers the most compelling link between Egypt, Ethio (Again, we would be speculating about linguistic play in the hands pia, and Apollo, despite his insistence on the waywardness of Ber of a misogynistic, pre-scientific culture.) nal's-and the Afrocentric-approach. As early as 1948, Snowden The seemingly endless possibilities at play in these etymologies makes reference to 'Negroes' on the coinage at Delphi and suggests might begin to appear all too postmodern, with pastiche and clever that the image of the black person might have been Delphos, the ness as currency in competitive plausibility. At the same time, Bernal eponymous hero at Delphi (Snowden 1948: 44). Insisting on the does make the point that classicists do not ask certain questions, 'Negroid' features of the bust, Snowden returns to the argument for questions that Afrocentrists do ask, as the Black Athena debate Delphos, Apollo's offspring in mythology with a black mother, in revealed. Lack of interest, then, limits possibilities, even though too Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient Views of Blacks (1983). Through much of a stake in the outcome certainly skews the information we out his decades of work, Snowden applied the same anachronous find. In the end, it turns out that Snowden, who quickly took sides against Bernal in the classicist camp, was one of Bernal's few peers in terminology-Negro, Negroid, black-for which he criticizes Bernal. 17 Yet textual, linguistic, and physical evidence, along with speculation, asking questions about colour and ethnic diversity in antiquity. do all amount to something quite black at Delphi, and the deraci Although Snowden avoided the Bernalian tendency to see things in nated, North African Egypt of nineteenth-century scholarship is not terms of conspiracy or cover up, the reality that certain questions are enough to remove the trace of race that informs such scholarship. not asked regarding the evidences we do have is a reflection on who is Whatever the case, Bernal does show the patience and meticulous conducting the investigations. The many wonderfulimages of 'blacks' attention to sources that might inform the non-specialist claims of in antiquity that grace the pages of Snowden's books tend not to find investigators like Johnson. We have already discussed the links be their way into textbooks on Greek art, so that Delphos, as an example, tween Apollo and Horus; the connections between the paean, the god is not oftendiscussed outside Afrocentric essays, Snowden's books, or of healing, and the sun; and the traces of a black eponymous hero at the Black Athena debate. The idea of a-black, Negro, African Delphi. It is worth mentioning Johnson's understanding of Delphi as eponymous hero at Delphi from outside Greece does in the end the navel of the earth, or the omphalos, because here the arguments change the narrative. There is certainly no cover up, but the fact are stunningly weak, although Bernal provides some help. Johnson that many of these images have remained in the back rooms of (1982: 280) digresses in the meaning of omphalos as 'stone' by making museums is a reflection on the lack of interest in them. In such a the observation that 'it may be more than a coincidence that the name context, the proposal of an African Apollo, as a subset to Bernal's Peter, so important to Christian worshippers, also means "stone'' or larger Black Athena project, takes on heretical tones, rather than "rock'". Johnson makes an entirely irrelevant point, but the specula being one of many, perhaps equally plausible, ideas at play in the tive play on words and meaning is, in the end, shown to be all there is study of antiquity. to work with at times, even when done well. Bernal reveals how So we return, forthe third and final time, to the 'so what?' question. tenuous even certain well-established etymologies are. Bernal's simi Since it is a philosophical reality that we do search forourselves-and lar and perhaps more apropos play, when it is based on linguistic our differences-in the face of the other, the types of enquiries that rules, perhaps salvages Johnson's point about the omphalos: 'Never Bernal undertakes will continue to matter, as long as race is in play in theless, omphalos also means "navel" and it is interesting to note that the modern mind. As it pertains to our views of the past, an at Delphi the stone was sometimes decorated with what was supposed to be the skin of the Python Apollo had killed' (Bernal 2006: 473). 17 Today, we might add Thompson (1989) and Isaac (2004), to name only two of Bernal goes on to tie the delphus or 'womb' to the hystera, the floating the ever-increasing editions on the topic. 52 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 53 that Egyptian Pharaohs established the oracle at Delphi during the womb that causes hysteria and therefore needs to be weighted down. Ethiopian dynasty. Together, the clues and independent claims-even we might speculate further about hysteria, the madness of the Pythia, from those closer to the 'lunatic fringe' than orthodox scholars-do and oracular practices at Delphi, with its possible connections to read like a mystery novel (Bernal 1987: 276). Surprisingly, it is Egyptian or Ethiopian-African-social and religious practices. Snowden who offers the most compelling link between Egypt, Ethio (Again, we would be speculating about linguistic play in the hands pia, and Apollo, despite his insistence on the waywardness of Ber of a misogynistic, pre-scientific culture.) nal's-and the Afrocentric-approach. As early as 1948, Snowden The seemingly endless possibilities at play in these etymologies makes reference to 'Negroes' on the coinage at Delphi and suggests might begin to appear all too postmodern, with pastiche and clever that the image of the black person might have been Delphos, the ness as currency in competitive plausibility. At the same time, Bernal eponymous hero at Delphi (Snowden 1948: 44). Insisting on the does make the point that classicists do not ask certain questions, 'Negroid' features of the bust, Snowden returns to the argument for questions that Afrocentrists do ask, as the Black Athena debate Delphos, Apollo's offspring in mythology with a black mother, in revealed. Lack of interest, then, limits possibilities, even though too Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient Views of Blacks (1983). Through much of a stake in the outcome certainly skews the information we out his decades of work, Snowden applied the same anachronous find. In the end, it turns out that Snowden, who quickly took sides against Bernal in the classicist camp, was one of Bernal's few peers in terminology-Negro, Negroid, black-for which he criticizes Bernal. 17 Yet textual, linguistic, and physical evidence, along with speculation, asking questions about colour and ethnic diversity in antiquity. do all amount to something quite black at Delphi, and the deraci Although Snowden avoided the Bernalian tendency to see things in nated, North African Egypt of nineteenth-century scholarship is not terms of conspiracy or cover up, the reality that certain questions are enough to remove the trace of race that informs such scholarship. not asked regarding the evidences we do have is a reflection on who is Whatever the case, Bernal does show the patience and meticulous conducting the investigations. The many wonderfulimages of 'blacks' attention to sources that might inform the non-specialist claims of in antiquity that grace the pages of Snowden's books tend not to find investigators like Johnson. We have already discussed the links be their way into textbooks on Greek art, so that Delphos, as an example, tween Apollo and Horus; the connections between the paean, the god is not oftendiscussed outside Afrocentric essays, Snowden's books, or of healing, and the sun; and the traces of a black eponymous hero at the Black Athena debate. The idea of a-black, Negro, African Delphi. It is worth mentioning Johnson's understanding of Delphi as eponymous hero at Delphi from outside Greece does in the end the navel of the earth, or the omphalos, because here the arguments change the narrative. There is certainly no cover up, but the fact are stunningly weak, although Bernal provides some help. Johnson that many of these images have remained in the back rooms of (1982: 280) digresses in the meaning of omphalos as 'stone' by making museums is a reflection on the lack of interest in them. In such a the observation that 'it may be more than a coincidence that the name context, the proposal of an African Apollo, as a subset to Bernal's Peter, so important to Christian worshippers, also means "stone'' or larger Black Athena project, takes on heretical tones, rather than "rock'". Johnson makes an entirely irrelevant point, but the specula being one of many, perhaps equally plausible, ideas at play in the tive play on words and meaning is, in the end, shown to be all there is study of antiquity. to work with at times, even when done well. Bernal reveals how So we return, forthe third and final time, to the 'so what?' question. tenuous even certain well-established etymologies are. Bernal's simi Since it is a philosophical reality that we do search forourselves-and lar and perhaps more apropos play, when it is based on linguistic our differences-in the face of the other, the types of enquiries that rules, perhaps salvages Johnson's point about the omphalos: 'Never Bernal undertakes will continue to matter, as long as race is in play in theless, omphalos also means "navel" and it is interesting to note that the modern mind. As it pertains to our views of the past, an at Delphi the stone was sometimes decorated with what was supposed to be the skin of the Python Apollo had killed' (Bernal 2006: 473). 17 Today, we might add Thompson (1989) and Isaac (2004), to name only two of Bernal goes on to tie the delphus or 'womb' to the hystera, the floating the ever-increasing editions on the topic. 54 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 55

increasing number of scholarly publications are opening up the detail; and the interest to dedicate oneself to the task for a sustained perspective on the ancient world to include more on India and Persia, period of time-is certainly a way forward. We might not definitively as we have discussed. This is no doubt a result of the degree to which answer the question of an African origin of Apollo, but the question the constitution of the modern world is evolving to include a popu might lead to other astounding finds, such as a black eponymous hero lous China, India, and the Middle East. Certainly those places were at Delphi. For the black bodies in Brazil, and dark bodies elsewhere, always on the map, so to speak, but their interaction with the Western this line of questioning is as worthy of our attention as the possibility world, for a number of reasons, matters more to Western scholars and of Indian or Persian interaction with Western religious, social, or laypersons in Europe and the Americas. Indeed, colonized peoples cultural institutions, ancient and modern. have always had to gauge their assimilation of Western values and mores; European scholars, politicians, and economists now see their interaction with groups outside Europe and North America as critical to their economic and cultural survival. Within this context of a hybrid and global perspective, Africais also 18 perceived to be more in play than in the past. The Afrocentricidea is a case in point of how Western notions of progress, or even anti modernism, might continue to play a significant role forcertain parts of the whole. Snowden (1983: 67) cited Brazil as a counter-model to classical Athens and America vis-a-vis the treatment of black bodies. As the location to which a predominance of Africans was transported through the 1800s to serve as slaves, Brazil remains today the largest African diaspora (Page 1996). The factthat the slave trade there lasted furtively through much of the nineteenth century makes Brazil a hotspot, so to speak, for the study of African retentions in the New World. One wonders what clues to ancient practices we might find in the worship of hybridized, Africandeities in Brazil, like Exu, the god of crossroads who so resembles Hermes, or Iemarija, the Aphroditic 19 goddess of the sea. I am by no means here proposing a 'stolen legacy' or any direct influence, whereby we might chart analogies between the deities. Rather, I am pointing to syncretic cultural processes-not the manufactured heroism of certain strands of Afrocentrism-where contact is inevitable and worth investigating. The research approach that Bernal attempts-the evaluation of certain types of evidence, archaeological, documentary, and linguistic; a certain attention to

18 See Ferguson (2006) on the point that very little contemporary global history really engages with Africa, beyond the tokenistic. Nevertheless, Africa as a global and economic force cannot be denied. 19 Exu, or Esu, Elegba is the trope of Henry Louis Gates, Jr, for the signifying monkey, the Yoruba god of the crossroads that he sees as a figure for black American poetics. See Gates (1988); on African mythology in the New World more broadly, see Prandi (2001). 54 Patrice D. Rankine Black Apollo? 55